“Smell it,” Sam said, and drew in a long breath. What was it? Besides the odors of food and tobacco and coffee he could smell aspen and its berry bushes and grasses; geranium on the stone ledge above him; catnip in the palm of his left hand; and something that he was not able to identify. Rising, ride across his arm, he began to prowl in the woods around him. Lotus saw him through the trees, sniffing, turning his head this way and that; bending low to peer at something on the ground; and at last falling to his knees and going on all fours like a beast. On returning he said, “Funny I didn’t smell it before. Hank says when a man marries he loses half his sense and his enemies soon track him down.” He was sniffing at a finger. “Crows,” he said.
“The Absaroka. This is Crow country. Over there they made a fire and burned some hair in it. That don’t look good to this coon.”
“Crow,” said Lotus.
“A war party,” said Sam. He brought his stallion in and staked him as a sentinel only fifty feet from his bed. Then he went east a mile or two over the path the Crows had taken, to scout the area. He and his wife had been in Crow country several days; most of the mountain men trusted the Crows but Sam trusted no redman. He was worried but he tried to hide his mood from Lotus.
The next morning at daylight they headed south, and about noon he saw a wolf and suspected that buffalo were not far away. A few minutes later he sat on a hilltop, overlooking a herd. Seeing among the big shaggy beasts some deer and antelope, he knew that packs of wolves had surrounded the herd, to drag down the young, the sick, the wounded, the old, and the stragglers. It was a habit with deer and antelope to seek safety in buffalo herds. This was a large herd, and as Sam studied it he was again impressed by the orderly manner in which a big herd, even a hundred thousand head, moved across the miles. On the other hand, a herd would stampede at no l more than a shadow. The old-timers like Bill Williams said the herds put vedettes out, in the way of an army, to give the alarm if enemies approached-four or five young bulls that, on scenting the foe, would rush pell-mell straight for the herd. The cows and calves would then move to the center and the bulls would surround them. In April and May, during calving time, the bulls, went round and round the cows, to protect them from the wolves. In old age the bulls became abject victims of terror; all alone on a vast prairie a bull would give a feeble bellow when he saw wolves approaching, and the wolves would answer in concert.
While wondering if he was within rifle sound of Crow warriors it occurred to him that possibly this was the first herd of these beasts Lotus had ever seen. He turned to look at her face. What he saw there so riveted his attention that he could only stare. She was so lost in contemplation of the tens of thousands of beasts, making the prairie black as far as she could see, that she was unaware of him. Well, good Lord, she should see one of the big migrations, when a herd was a full hundred miles across, and extended to such depth that a man could only guess at the number. Williams and Bridger and other mountain men said they had seen herds of at least a million beasts, with ten thousand wolves around the circumference. .
Did she like buffalo better than fish and rabbit? Did he dare have tenderloin for supper? It was his favorite meat. Mick Boone was extremely fond of moose, if it was taken in its prime. Bear Paws Meek was a beaver-tail man; he swore that a tail, properly seasoned and expertly basted with wild goose oil, was the only food he would ask for in heaven. Cady preferred elk.
Sam examined his rifle and they rode forward until they were about three hundred yards from the nearest beasts. Again he studied them. He wanted a fat tender one and a swift clean kill. A buffalo, unless shot through the heart or brains or spine, took a lot of time to die. While sitting and watching he told Lotus his favorite story of a greenhorn. An especially choice lubber, callow and green, had fired eight or nine pistol balls into a bull and had then stood, nonplused and bug-eyed, while blood poured from the beast’s nostrils. A practical joker had told the numskull to slip up from the rear and hamstring the bull. He could then cut its throat. Accepting the suggestion, the city tenderfoot had crept up behind the bull and stabbed at one of its hams with a knife. In that instant the beast exploded with fury, its nostrils spouting blood and foam for thirty feet. For some inexplicable reason the tenderfoot had seized the bull’s short stiff tail, and the bull then whirled round and round at such speed that the man clinging to its tail was flung off his feet and laid out on the air; and round and round he went, his eyes popped out like glazed marbles, his voice begging for help. Then the bull dropped dead. The thing that had scared the daylights out of him, the greenhorn afterward confessed, was his fear that the tail would pull out or break off.
Telling Lotus to be alert, Sam left her and slipped forward, until he was only forty yards from a young barren cow. He shot it through the heart and was cutting its throat when Lotus came forward. Sam rolled the beast over to its belly and pulled the four legs out like broken braces to prop it. He made an incision from the boss to the tail and skinned the heavy hide back both ways. Entering a side, he cut the liver free and drew it out. Laying it across the cow’s back, he sliced off several morsels, offered one to Lotus on the point of his knife, and plopped one into his mouth. As Lotus chewed her black eyes smiled at him. When going to a pannier for his hatchet Sam had to kick a coyote out of his path and chase a dozen into the distance. Coyotes were a worse nuisance than flies when a man was butchering. They would come in close, while the wolves, farther out, trotted back and forth, drooling. If you threw a piece of flesh to a coyote the idiot instead of eating it would make off with it, and the wolves would pounce on it and tear the meat from its jaws. It sometimes looked as if the coyote was the half-witted lackey of its larger and more ferocious cousin. Both beasts were also a camp nuisance. They would slink into a camp and chew saddles and bridles and leather clothing, and had been known to eat a part of the moccasins off a sleeping man’s feet.
Pausing every few moments to look round him for enemies, Sam chopped the ribs in two along both sides, and the spine in two, back and front, so that he could lift out the choicest portion of the tenderloin. That ought to do them for supper, he said. Lotus had been looking round for edible roots, and came in with an armful of lupine and two dozen mushrooms. Sam looked hard at the lupine. The camas root he had eaten, after it was pounded into flour and mixed with water to make flat dough-cakes, which were then baked over hot stones. The onion bulb, or poh-poh, made into a thick jelly, was even more tasteless than the camas, or the skunk cabbage, mixed with the inner bark of pine or hemlock. He preferred cakes made of sunflower or buffalo and blue grama grass seeds. He had never eaten the lupine root.
Lotus went off again and returned with a quart of the blue-purple chokecherries. Sam made a face at them, for they puckered the hell out of a person’s mouth. Knowing how he prepared mushrooms. Lotus made incisions in their plump bellies, stuffed inside each a blob of marrow fat, and set the buttons on their backs in an inch of hot hump fat. When they were turned to a nice golden brown and the steaks were hot and dripping and the sliced lupine roots were sizzling in a platter of fat and the coffee was steaming Sam looked up at the sky, for this was his way of saying grace before a meal. Every time he feasted he thanked the Giver of the earth’s fantastic abundance.
“No taxes,” he said. He had uttered these words so many times that Lotus now said, “No taxes.”
“No jails.”
“No jails.”
‘The steaks were as tender as young Canada goose. The mushrooms melted in his mouth. Even the lupine tasted fine.
“Good?” he asked.
“Good,” she said, gravely nodding.
Sam chose a fat golden mushroom and offered it to her on the point of a green stick. She opened her mouth in a pucker, sucked the mushroom in, and closed her eyes. He fed her choice morsels of steak, knowing all the while that she was abashed by these little gallantries. Instead of feeding their wives delicious morsels the red husbands as likely as not kicked them away from the fire and left for them only the
scraps of the feast. Still, most of the squaws were fat, and Lotus, it seemed to him, had gained ten pounds since her wedding day.
Sam had cooked the whole tenderloin and half the liver. Raw liver and rose hips, the older mountain men said, were enough to keep any man healthy, if he also had pure water and air and a hard bed. Some of them ate a lot of yarrow, including its white flowers when it was blooming; as well as the onion bulb, the thorn apple, pine nuts, watercress, and viscera besides liver. Sam had watched red women in the Snake River country shake chilled grasshoppers off sagebrush into baskets, in cold September mornings, and roast them in pits and pound them into cakes, as well as crickets, mice, snakes, wood ticks, and ants. He had seen them thicken soup with these things, and though Bill Williams said they were all fine Sam had refused to taste them. Just the same, Bill could outwalk any man in the country, and go for two or three days and nights without food, sleep, or rest.
After they had eaten and Sam had smoked a pipe they both set to work on the buffalo hide. Stretching it flat on the earth, fur side down, with knives and stone chisels they took off every last particle of the flesh and fat. While Lotus boiled this flesh and fat into a thick gelatinous soup, Sam opened the skull and tool; out the brains. He then turned the task over to his wife, for the reason that no man seemed to have a woman’s intuitive skills in making fine leathers and robes of the skins of beasts. Sam sat back, rifle across his arm, and smoked another pipe while drinking another cup of coffee.
What a beautiful evening, and what a wonderful life it was! He hoped he would live to be a hundred years old.
10
NEVER HAD SAM been so happy as on this long journey south; he would never be as ha py again. He so loved them that he found delight in telling her the name of every mountain range, peak, river, creek, valley, and landmark they passed, or could see in the distance—Yellowstone, Powder River, Meadowlark Lake, Sun River Creek, Tongue River, Rosebud Creek, Papoose Peak, Black Panther Creek, Absaroka Summit, Little Goose Pass, South Pass—he loved them all, for in his soul they were like the call of the French horn in a Mozart concerto.
Side by side when eating or sleeping or riding Sam told her about the men he had met since coming west—Three-Finger McNees, a tall slender man as straight as a lodgepole, with coarse black hair and beard, a grave mien, and one eye cocked off at an angle of forty-five degrees from the other. He was a tough critter in a fight—and so was Lost-Skelp Dan, a muscular scowling giant who kept putting a hand back over his hideless skull, as though to brush his hair. Lord, how he hated the redmen! It was Dan’s ambition to scalp a thousand—and he didn’t take off a mere topknot, but the hull thing, as Bill would say, clear down to the ears and halfway to the eyebrows. She would see Jim Bridger soon; except Kit Carson, he was about the most famous of them all, unless it was old Caleb Greenwood or Solomon Silver or Moses Harris or Jim Clyman. Not all of those were free trappers. The free trappers were a clan of their own, and man for man could lick any gang on earth or in all the
spaces beyond.
Jim Bridger was probably the biggest liar in the whole pack. Though it was said that he could neither read nor write, and talked as if he had found his English in an Indian tepee, he dearly loved to spill his chin music and spin his yarns, especially if greenhorns were listening. He loved to tell the lubbers from back east that he had once run for his life with three hundred tall Cheyennes after him; that he came to trees and clum, and fell down and clum other trees; crawled out on a limb and found it as full of redskins as a blooming chokecherry with honey bees; fell plum to the ground and clum other trees, till his hands were gummed over an inch deep with sticky pine sap. But he kept running and came at last to a canyon that narrered and narrered and closed down to a pinch that a spider couldn’t get through; and there he was, with three hundred red devils swarming over him, and arrers falling as thick as pine needles in a hurrycane. At that point Jim would stop. The bug-eyed greenhorns, mouths agape, cheeks twitching, would stare at him; and in a hoarse whisper one would ask, “What happened, Mr. Bridger?” In a weary old voice Bridger would say, “They kilt me.”
Another of Jim’s favorite talks to novices was about a panther, which he called a painter. He was hunting elk on the flanks of Battle Mountain, when suddenly out of a thicket came a painter, to study him with cold green eyes, while the tail moved back and forth. Jim had felt awful oneasy; jist lookin at the critter made him shiver and shake, for he kallated that the painter was sizing up his dinner. “Nice ole feller,” Jim said to him, and made like he was dying to stroke and pat him. But with a flip and a Hop and two somersaults the painter was right in front of him, his mouth open four feet wide. His teeth were as long as Bowie knives. There was nothing to do but reach into the mouth and down torst the tail and grab it, and quicker than a wink turn him inside out. He was then headed in another direction, and figgerun that Jim had jist took off, he sailed out of sight. “When one of the greenhorns said, ‘Aw shucks,’ it kinda dawned on me that he thought Jim wasn’t exactly telling the truth.”
He guessed maybe she had never heard of old Caleb Greenwood. Caleb said the bravest of all the red people were the Crows, but then he was prejudiced, for he had married one, named Batchicka. She was not a mere winter squaw, as so many red women were for whitemen, but a fine year-round work-plug. The truth was that Caleb had loved his wife and his five sons and two daughters.
One son and one daughter they would have, Sam said, patting his wife’s belly.
The Caleb-Batchicka relationship had touched Sam’s sentimental soul. In his late seventies Caleb became almost blind, and when all the Indian medicines failed him he asked his wife to take him to St. Louis. For weeks she had shot buffalo and jerked the flesh, dried fruits, gathered roots, and made leather clothing for all of them. Then, with her husband and all the children but the oldest son. she had climbed into a canoe and headed down the river. In Siouxland they were attacked by a horde of shrieking warriors. most of whom plunged into the river and swam toward them, bent on plunder; but when Batchicka laid open the skull of one with a canoe paddle the others went howling to the bank. Learning somehow that her man was blind and helpless, the braves so admired the woman’s i courage that they gave her safe passage down the river. In St. Louis, Caleb hah had growths removed from both eyes and had come with his family back up the river. Now somewhere in his eighties he was kicking as hard as ever.
Sam wondered what the white people back east, with their turbid feculent rivers and garbage dumps, would think of Caleb’s love for a squaw. or Loretto’s, or his, or Kit Carson’s for Maria Josefa Jaramillo. After telling Lotus about Caleb and Batchicka, Sam felt a bit choked up. Slipping down, he put his arms around his wife as she sat on her horse; and she looked down at him with strange and wonderful things in her eyes. He looked up to meet her gaze (this had become a habit with them) and they looked into the eyes of one another, without smiling or speaking.
If he went blind, Sam said, in words and signs, would she take him down the river?
“Yes,” she said.
“Make pemmican?”
“Yes.”
“Kill my enemies?”
“Yes.”
“You love me’?” She knew the words but she didn’t know what love meant.
“Yes,” she said.
Sam hugged her, his face pressed to her belly. “I love you,” he said, and mounted his horse.
When they came to a beast that had been killer Sam examined it, with Lotus at his side. He said he could usually tell the kind of killer. The wolf nearly always attacked buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope in the flank or ham; the mountain lion seized the throat of larger beasts, and wrenching the head around, broke the neck; the grizzly left the marks of its terrible claws. Of them all, the wolf for its size had the strongest jaws and teeth. Whitemen, he told her, had a small dog called a terrier; it would attack a wolf or a whole pack of wolves. He had once seen wolves literally tear a terrier in two, as he had seen a grizzly tear a badger in two. Whiteme
n had a larger dog, part staghound, part bull, that could kill a wolf, or even two or three, in a fight. The wolf was such a powerful beast that it had been known to drag an eighteen-pound trap, attached to a forepaw, for twenty-five miles in a few hours—and at the end of that time had enough stamina left to outrun a man and disappear.
With boyish pride in all the things he had learned in seven years Sam halted to show her a scent post and the furrows in the earth left by claws. After voiding its urine against the tree the wolf had scratched the earth, in the foolish way of the dog family. There was its run, he said, pointing; it was always in fairly open country—the bottoms of canyons, dry ravines, the lowest saddles across divides. The only unfailing scent-lure for a wolf was the scrapings from a scent post, taken far from the wolf run where the trap was to be set. Unfamiliar wolf urine caused a male wolf to tremble with excitement and run round and round, sniffing and snapping, and stepping at last on the hidden plate of the trap. Sam told her that while he was gone from her this winter, wolves might bivouac her and try to bring down her horse. He would show her how to trap them. She would kill a rabbit and wet her hands in its blood; she would cut the rabbit in small pieces and scatter it over an area as large as her father’s village; and in the center of it she would set the trap just below the level of the snow and put a thin covering of snow over the plate.
Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Page 11
